NYFF 64: "My Undesirable Friends: Part II - Exile" is as vivid as its predecessor

by Joanna Sodeman-Taylor

Forget spectacle, forget box office, forget IP and star power. Digger? I hardly know her! The biggest, most epic movie of the year is Julia Loktev’s six-hour documentary My Undesirable Friends: Part II - Exile, a continuation of last year’s Part I, subtitled Last Air in Moscow. That film followed roughly a dozen journalists, most of them women, at the independent reporting outfit known as TV Rain. These folks had already spent years operating as “undesirables” or “foreign agents” (ie, folks not mindlessly repeating government propaganda), and worked to undermine the dictums coming from the Kremlin despite constant surveillance and the imprisonment of several colleagues. Last Air in Moscow concluded with a huge chunk of TV Rain’s reporters fleeing Russia following the start of their invasion into Ukraine in February 2022.

The military operation led Putin’s government to immediately crack down on independent media, meaning these journalists had to get the fuck out of dodge or risk being jailed. Last Air in Moscow filmed across a span of several months in 2021-2022, and Exile takes up right where that film left off, seeing those same faces (and a few new ones) all the way to March 2026...

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NYFF 64: Currents Program #4 - "The Real World" Confronts Reality Head-On

by Joanna Sodeman-Taylor

We’re coming to you live from the 64th New York Film Festival with the hottest ticket of the whole event: The Currents short film programs! Program #4 is cheekily subtitled “The Real World”, bringing to you four films with unique narrative and stylistic understanding to one very fair question: How many realities does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Especially at a moment in time where “reality” has become so easy to manufacture, and memories created and destroyed at a moment’s notice for no reason other than capitalist convenience, that’s an important question to ask, whether the goal is to speculate on the future or reclaim a past. There’s no easy answer, but the human creativity and inventiveness these directors bring show how rewarding it can be to wrestle with such topics...

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NYFF 64: “Clarissa” is the best “Mrs. Dalloway” adaptation you’ll ever see

by Cláudio Alves

Between Wuthering Heights and The Odyssey, much has been said this year about the merits and demerits of film adaptations straying from their source material. Most of the time, I’m a defender of unfaithfulness in the transformation of a text between mediums. Indeed, some of the most interesting aspects of both those box office success stories are precisely the dialogues established between them and their literary origins, deviation as conversation. Moreover, the general public’s idea of fidelity to a text can be superficial, to say the least, and believe me, I’m trying to be diplomatic in my choice of words here. Some would say Arie and Chuko Esiri’s Clarissa is a wild re-imagining of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, unfaithful as can be in its transposition of a narrative set in post-WWI England to contemporary Nigeria.

They would be wrong. Not because the Esiri brothers don’t do what I’ve just described, but because, in this gesture, they have managed to capture the essence of Mrs. Dalloway in ways no other cineaste has to this day. Step aside, Gorris and Daldry, for there are new masters of putting Woolf on screen to join Sally Potter in her tiny pantheon. And it’s precisely through their changes to the classic novel that they manage to make Clarissa the best Mrs. Dalloway we’re likely to see in the annals of film history, yesteryear’s and those to come, purists be damned…

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Review: "Digger" is as Frustrating as it is Confounding

By Ben Miller

Alejandro G. Inarritu's Digger is sure to be divisive. While you might have an understanding of the film's tone and messaging early on, a sharp-left turn in the narrative reframes your entire comprehension of what transpires. It's a real mess.

It's going to be very difficult to talk in detail about this film without discussing spoilers, but if you are confused by reading my review, imagine how you would feel in the theater. When the "twist" happens, I stared at the screen incredulous about what I was watching. "This? This is what the film is doing?" You can't even get your bearings on the new reality of the film before it switches back to how it started. It's an insane way to make a film, and an even more insane way to present it...

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NYFF 64: Austria’s “Rose” is much more than merely another Sandra Hüller showcase

by Cláudio Alves

While our TIFF 51 coverage isn’t over – sometimes, it feels like it will go on forever, with Eurocheese and I falling into Sisyphus' fate – one must acknowledge the other big festival of the moment. Right now, the New York Film Festival is blessing audiences with some of the best in world cinema, from September 25 to October 12. As we’ve done in years past, Joanna Sodeman-Taylor will join me in covering the fest from a distance, relying on screeners and whatnot. Hope you enjoy this wild virtual ride.

To kickstart these NYFF musings, why not consider another Best International Oscar submission? This one’s from Austria and last Berlinale’s Best Leading Performance Silver Bear winner, Rose. Indeed, most of the chatter about Markus Schleinzer’s latest has focused on Sandra Hüller’s work, a tour de force at the heart of a film that, nevertheless, is much more complicated than a mere acting showcase. Set in the aftermath of the Thirty Years’ War, Rose is a story assembled from various cases documented in legal archives of the time, about those who were born as women to society’s eyes yet assumed male identities to liberate themselves from the limits of their sex. In the 17th century and beyond, there were and there are many Roses…

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